


Q: When is a safe not a safe?

by hannahncakes



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Friendship, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-27
Updated: 2013-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-27 19:11:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/982563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannahncakes/pseuds/hannahncakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All he wanted to know was what was in the safe. But somehow that became far more complicated than he ever intended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Q: When is a safe not a safe?

**Author's Note:**

> written for Mid0nz’s BBC Sherlock Writing Contest in response to prompt 7 ‘What’s in the safe behind John’s chair?’

“What’s in the safe John?” He would ask, without fail, at least once a day.   
“So come on the John. Think. What motivation would the killer have? Why would he have left these specific, if seemingly random, objects? What’s in the safe?” Sometimes he would throw the question in in the middle of a case, amongst a string of unrelated questions in the hope that John would somehow trip up and answer accidentally.   
“I don’t understand why you insist on keeping this secret from me John, we’re flat mates. This is our flat. You shouldn’t keep things from me.” Occasionally he would try to guilt him into confessing- try to play the role of ‘the hurt friend’ as he played so many other roles to get what he wanted.   
Every time, however the question was phrased, John would simply smile and shrug noncommittally and Sherlock would huff and pout and storm off.   
The answer was, of course, nothing. There was nothing whatsoever in the safe. But he would never tell that to Sherlock.   
He’d been visiting Harry one day (collecting some things, trying not to talk about the fact she was clearly drinking again) and she’d insisted that he take the damn thing home with him- claiming she no longer had space for it. John had complained bitterly but in the end, as usual, Harry had won and he’d lugged the damn thing all the way back to the flat, all the way up the stairs, and dumped it behind his chair- where it has stayed ever since. Sherlock had looked up briefly as the great hunk of metal clanged to the floor and muttered “why do you have a safe? What’s in the safe, John?” in that bored drawl he adopted so frequently when inquiring about things that didn’t involve murder or any other form of imminent destruction.  
“It’s just…” John had begun but as he looked at his flat mate, his friend, who lay there on the sofa completely uninterested in what he was about to say he stopped. He thought for a second before continuing: “it’s kind of a secret, really. I’m not supposed to tell anyone about it.”   
“A secret?” Sherlock sat bolt upright, like a cat suddenly aware of a mouse. “You can tell me. You have to tell me.”   
John looked at him and tried not to smile. Instead he shrugged and sat down in his chair and picked up the paper like he always did, leaving Sherlock looking baffled.   
So maybe there was something in the safe after all. There was a lie. A lie one friend told another on a whim that could now never be undone. A lie that he had to uphold. He changed the combination on the safe daily (sometimes more than that) to keep Sherlock from ever being able to get into it. He did this because he was vain and he was weak. He did this because while he had a secret, while he had the safe, Sherlock was always interested in him- analysing him, deducing what possible motivation he could have to hide such a secret from his closest friend. He did this because he was living with the Sherlock Holmes and he was merely a John Watson.   
It had occurred to John often (both before the safe’s appearance and after) that there was only so long this living arrangement, this partnership, this whatever-the-hell-this-was could continue. The man he had inadvertently befriended, whom he had come to rely on more than he would like to admit and in more ways that he wanted to think about, was the most brilliant man he had ever known. He saw things other people didn’t see, he could tell you what you were going to say before you said it, he was able to catch any criminal known to man, he could bring a whole country to its knees if he so desired and he was living, working, socialising with an ex-army doctor with a dodgy shoulder and a limp that was all in his head. It was only a matter of time before he got bored and found a new sounding board, someone who could match his intellect and possibly even, occasionally, follow his train of thought.  
Hence the safe. He knew it wouldn’t (that it couldn’t) last forever but this was a way of prolonging it. He had to make himself seem more interesting than he was, more of a puzzle, so that Sherlock would want to keep him around. Because he wanted to stay here, in 221B, where his nightmares subsided and he finally felt safe for as long as he could and he wanted to stay solving crimes with Sherlock until they were too old to run through the streets and he wanted Sherlock to continue looking at him as if he were some magnificent puzzle he couldn’t quite put together. He wanted these things for all these reasons and he wanted these things for other reasons that he wouldn’t even consider thinking about. All he knew was that they all centred around Sherlock. 

John had an empty safe behind his chair. Sherlock knew this. Sherlock had always known this. On the very first night John had brought it home Sherlock had cracked the code (easily, John was nothing if not predictable) and looked inside only to be confronted by a vast expanse of nothing. Not a thing. No scrap of paper, no key, no hidden panels (he’d checked) just nothing. So he could only conclude that John had brought an empty safe into the house and was continually avoiding telling him that it was, in fact, empty.   
He wanted to know why John would do that so he kept asking, every day, what was in the safe. Each time John didn’t answer and each night Sherlock checked and it was still empty. He wondered, often, why John would lie to him. He could see many things (the scratch marks on the side of the safe where John had knocked it into a wall, the chips on the paintwork from when it once resided at Harry’s house, the small biro mark where a pen had slipped while someone wrote on a piece of paper on top of it) but he couldn’t see into John’s mind- no matter how much he wished he could.   
Of course he could never tell John that he knew the safe was empty because it would appear to John (and many other people who just didn’t _think_ the way he did) as an act of betrayal, of going behind his back and breaking some kind of code of ethics people seemed to believe existed. He knew this was how John would react because he knew John. John was good. John was decent. If there was a locked safe belonging to a friend John would not even consider breaking into it. John would just let it be. Sherlock wished so much that he could be like John.   
John wasn’t like any other person he had ever met. They were all so stupid, so ignorant and unwilling to listen whereas John called him _brilliant._ John smiled at him. John just shook his head and carried on tidying when Sherlock’s moods became so black all he could do was curl up on the sofa for days. John cared if he ate or slept, if he was well and not even because he had to, like his mother or Mycroft, but because he wanted to. John was his friend.   
John was his friend and John had an empty safe in their flat that he was lying about and Sherlock didn’t understand why. He wanted to know every thought that ever went on in John’s head. He wanted to crawl under his skin and be part of him so they could never be pulled apart. But he knew that you simply could not voice opinions like this if you ever wanted to keep your only friend, the only person who cared for you and the only reason you could make it through the darkest of times. So he never said anything except to ask, every day, what was in the safe. And hope that maybe one day he would tell him and explain to him all the things his genius brain could never comprehend.

**Author's Note:**

> [Q: when is a safe not a safe?   
> A: When it’s a physical embodiment of a complex relationship two people cannot explain, even to themselves]


End file.
